Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Signposts: Rat Cyborgs Outperform Rats, Computers

Cyborg intelligence is an emerging kind of intelligence paradigm. It
aims to deeply integrate machine intelligence with biological
intelligence by connecting machines and living beings via neural
interfaces, enhancing strength by combining the biological cognition
capability with the machine computational capability.

Cyborg intelligence is considered to be a new way to augment living
beings with machine intelligence says Chinese researchers Yipeng Yu,
Gang Pan, Yongyue Gong, Kedi
Xu, Nenggan Zheng, Weidong Hua, Xiaoxiang Zheng, and Zhaohui Wu

Credit: Penn State University

In a recent paper, the researchers describe how they created rat cyborgs
to demonstrate how rats can expedite the maze escape task with
integration of machine intelligence. They compared the performance of
maze solving by computer, by individual rats, and by computer-aided rats
(i.e. rat cyborgs). The rats had to find their way from a constant
entrance to a constant exit in fourteen diverse mazes.

Experimental system for maze solving.

Credit: PLoS ONE

Performance of maze solving was measured by steps, coverage rates, and
time spent. The experimental results with six rats and their
intelligence-augmented rat cyborgs show that rat cyborgs have the best
performance in escaping from mazes. These results provide a
proof-of-principle demonstration for cyborg intelligence. In addition,
their novel cyborg intelligent system (rat cyborg) has great potential
in various applications, such as search and rescue in complex terrains....MORE